The American People - Volume 1 - Search For My Heart - A Novel

Renowned playwright and author Larry Kramer’s stunning work of imagination and courage reimagines American history from John Wilkes Booth to Joseph McCarthy in this long-awaited, devastating satire

Forty years in the making, The American People sets forth Larry Kramer’s vision of his homeland

As the founder of ACT UP and the author of Faggots and The Normal Heart, Kramer has decisively affected American lives and letters

Here he reimagines our history

This is the story of one nation under a plague, contaminated by greed, hate, and disease and host to transcendent acts of courage and kindness

In this first volume, which runs up to the 1950s, we meet prehistoric monkeys who spread a peculiar virus, a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions, and early English settlers who establish loving same-sex couples only to fall prey to the forces of bigotry

George Washington and Alexander Hamilton revel in unexpected intimacies, and John Wilkes Booth’s motives for assassinating Abraham Lincoln are thoroughly revised

In the twentieth century, the nightmare of history deepens as a religious sect conspires with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals, and the AIDS virus begins to spread

Against all this, Kramer sets the intimate heartfelt story of a middle-class family outside Washington, D.C., trying to cope with the darkest of times

The American People is a work of ribald satire, prophetic outrage, and dazzling imagination

It is an encyclopedic indictment, written with outrageous love